I have four bettas - two males, an adult female, and a 'baby betta' who is also (I'm almost positive) female.

The males, Arthur and Merlin, are in a divided 20 gallon with a small colony of ghost shrimp and 3 ivory mystery snails.

The females, Mara (adult) and Phoenix (baby) are in a divided 5 gallon.

I also have a cat named Maui, and am adopting a special needs cat named Beauty here pretty soon. The situation is a little confusing because ~landlady~ and ~rent~ but my hope is to have them both living with me come August.

Anyway. Everybody gets up to something on a near daily basis, and after some shenanigans today I decided I might as well start keeping track of it somewhere.

Today's shenanigans center entirely around Mara. She's a female CT that I rescued from a local PetSmart after I found her in blue water with sever bloating and floating on her side at the top of her cup, surrounded by a bunch of pellets. I thought she was dead. I brought her home, she recovered fantastically well, and is now in the divided tank with the baby, Phoenix.

The divider in this tank is DIY, but very secure. Unfortunately it was not tall enough, as I had not realized that Mara was a jumper and even if I had I would have definitely underestimated the height that fish could get. When I came upstairs to check on them again and to get ready for bed I was horrified to find Mara on the wrong side of the divider, hanging out with Phoenix. And I really do just mean hanging out. They were both completely relaxed and swimming around and over each other, almost touching, without even the slightest hint of aggression. They were both curious and happy and friendly as ever. It took a minute before I could process it and frantically scoop Mara out, but I don't think they would have hurt each other. I have no idea how long they were like that, either.

No damage done, no stress. Nada.

At least I can take solace in the fact that if I ever start a sorority with these lovely ladies they won't be the slightest bit bothered by each other.

I took a bunch of pictures of the girls today because I realized I don't have any good pictures of Mara that aren't of her floating on her side when I first got her >.<

...I still don't have any good pictures of Mara. She doesn't hold still!

I got some decent pictures of Phoenix, though! All of these pictures were taken within 10 minutes. Much of the time now Phoenix is fairly colorful, but occasionally something will startle her and all of the color will just disappear and her stripes come back.

Well today's news isn't fish related. I have one cat, Maui, and am adopting a second cat with special needs. I had hoped to be able to have both with me at college this year, but my landlady set my limit to just one cat. So I've made the painful decision to leave Maui at home with my mom for one more year and take in Beauty. This way she will not have to remain at the shelter for another year or, worse, get adopted by somebody else (worse for me anyway).

As far as fishies go today they're all happy and active! I made homemade food following oldifshlady's recipe and have been feeding it to everybody the past two days and I've never seen them so happy. Arthur's built his fluffiest bubble nest yet. The picture doesn't do it justice, and he's already expanded it quite a bit since I took it. And Phoenix is finally starting to put on some weight! Woo!

I'm not really sure what's going on, but my two adult mystery snails have been acting really sluggish (even for snails) the past week. They don't cruise the tank anymore and spend most of their time upside down and half out of their shells :( I think they're dying and I can't figure out why. All of my water parameters are perfect - I just tested them this afternoon. The third, smaller snail is perfectly fine. It's been inching all across the tank and eating up algae along the way.

I thought maybe the snails weren't getting enough food, so I put in a few slices of cucumber and set them on top of the slices so they knew they were there and they didn't even touch them. When I first got them they ate through two slices completely in just under two days.

I've been losing shrimp intermittently, too, although I've been blaming that on the bettas... could there be something going on that I'm not seeing? Sigh.

I noticed this weird thing with Phoenix's gill cover last night. It looks like it's too long for her head. She's not acting any differently and is eating as greedily as always, so I'm not really sure what to make of it...